Blue Prince

Stunning in its vastness and meticulousnes. Dense, deep puzzles and a continuous stream of discoveries kept us engaged for nearly 100 hours. That's extremely rare for any game, much less a puzzle game. The pacing was occasionally frustrating and the RNG worked against us as much as it worked for us. But the sheer scale and specificity of everything outweighs any flaws and untied loose ends. Everything about BP's design was just so graceful. I was constantly impressed with how precisely every game mechanic fit together. The actual deck builder was fun in its own right, but it blows my mind how deeply connected every inch of it was to the underlying meta puzzles. Every inch of this game was precise and rocked. Though there was actual in-game progression too, I loved the knowledge-based power curve. The more we knew about the house, the more successfully you could build and navigate it. Some could be a little obtuse, but marinating on the puzzles and/or some (eventual) light web searching kept us moving. Each time our interest waned, we'd find a New Clue that would pull us back in. I also took more notes than I've ever taken for a game- probably 100 distinct pages, plus countless screenshots. Gameplay wise, we drafted more than 2,300 rooms across 83 in-game days, taking more than 7,400 steps across those runs. We hit the initial credits after 17 hours or so, but that was basically just the tutorial. This game was a blast, gripes and all.